Anyone interested in the status of Russian archives should read the NY Times article, “Iron Archives.” However, some of its claims about the shrinking access to Russian archives should be put in context. For example, anything that is located in the infamous Presidential Archive is off limits, except if you have connections. I know a few scholars who’ve gotten special dispensation to work there. The Foreign Policy and Military archives (19^th century materials are available) are also closed.

It is also true that the declassification process has been slowed. As the article points out and honest archivists will attest, this is mostly because the process has been formalized. The body in charge of declassification, the Commission on State Secrets, is under funded and understaffed. Add the lack of incentive to make documents open and the process slows to a crawl. But scholars shouldn’t take this as a sign that archival research on “sensitive subjects” is impossible. Sure military and foreign policy are out. Postwar Communist Party materials are also difficult to get your hands on. Russia also has a policy concerning personal files. They are only accessible after 75 years unless you have permission from the family. However, historians of some of the darkest moments in Soviet history will tell you that documentation about the Terror, Collectivization, deportation, and the GULAG are abundant. A lot of documentation in the Presidential Archive will only spice up footnotes and pad bibliographies. The new information they contain will mostly further confirm already existing materials. Also, in most archives a researcher with good connections can get classified material even if it is classified. But despite what anyone thinks, there is little left to know that the archives can tell us. I personally doubt that there are any smoking guns buried deep in even the most secret Russian archives. Access to them will only satisfy historians’ own archival fetish.

Still, each Russian archive has its own rules and culture. State and Provincial Archives like the ones cited in the article fall under the laws and policies of Rosarkhiv, the State Archival Administration. Their rules specifically make statements about researchers’ rights to open materials. If all else fails, embarrassing archivist by citing these rules can sometimes works. Going straight to the director does too. The most difficult archives are the ones that are under city administrations. The Moscow City Archive for Social Movements is notoriously difficult. I think I was able to work there by charm alone.

The real problem with Russian archives is not reclassification or access. It is funding. The Komsomol archive where I work has had a staff reduction from 8 to 4 people. Many archives are housed in crumbling buildings or worse are considered prime real estate. Some, like the State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, have been forced to move. As the main state archive for the 19^th century, this is a huge blow to the history of the Imperial period. The lack of funding has also prevented archives from modernizing their reading rooms, purchasing copiers, microfilm readers, etc. The most modern archives are the ones like the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History and others who have signed publishing deals with Western publishers like Yale University Press.

Lastly, Russian archives are beginning to suffer from a lack in training. Pay is incredibly low—about $100 a month. Most of the staff is either old, mentally deranged or both. Recent rules have reduced archival training to simply a certificate rather than a degree. The next generation of archivists will be poorly trained, paid, and therefore disinterested.

So put in this perspective the status of Russian archives is direr than the Western historians’ obsession with classification.

All this said, my favorite part of the whole article was the final quote from Robert Conquest. I quote the Times quoting him:

“There’s a drive of sorts toward the truth,” said Robert Conquest, the venerable cold warrior and author of “The Great Terror.” “After all, they didn’t really manage to totally suppress it the whole Soviet period, in spite of destroying the intelligentsia and ruining the country.”

It’s funny for a historian like him to speak about the truth. Especially coming from a guy who once declared that rumor was one of the best sources for understanding the Soviet Union. Plus how would he know about suppressing the truth? To my knowledge, none of his books contain a single archival citation. There is some speculation around the field whether the man has ever stepped into a Russian archive at all.

Are Putin and his cohort afflicted with trauma? This is the question Richard Lourie poses in an interesting column in the Moscow Times. Lourie rhetorically asks, why does an administration with 70 percent approval use such force against a small and politically insignificant opposition. Was it yet another sign of the “turn toward authoritarianism or pre-election jitters?” Lourie writes that:

It was a bit of both, but behind both lies a deeper cause. President Vladimir Putin and his generation were shaped by the traumatic collapse of the Soviet Union, just as previous generations were shaped by revolution, terror or war. Their own personal relationship to the Soviet Union and its demise — their sense of loss, regret and acrimony — is dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the event itself. Their shock resulted from seeing that something as mighty and gigantic as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could vanish so suddenly and so easily. The Titanic of empires, it was the biggest ship of state that ever sank.

Putin’s often quoted and often misunderstood remark that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” should be understood as much psychologically as politically. People will argue for years to come about the cause of its demise, but for people like Putin who were on board the ship of state as it began sinking, the one lasting lesson is that if something so seemingly invincible as the Soviet Union can go down so swiftly, there’s no reason the same thing can’t happen with the new Russia, which is smaller and less fearsome.

A great deal of Putin’s behavior — the brutality in Chechnya, the fear of a Ukraine-style revolution and nongovernmental organizations, the centralization of authority, the control of the media and the beating of demonstrators — makes more sense if seen as a pattern stemming from the trauma of the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin himself said in his book “First Person”: “[M]y mission, my historical mission — and this will sound lofty, but it’s true — consisted of resolving the situation in the Northern Caucasus … and Chechnya [which is] a continuation of the collapse of the Soviet Union. … If we don’t put an immediate end to this, Russia will cease to exist.”

Lourie states, and I emphasize, that while trauma provides another layer for understanding, it is no excuse for these acts. Given my own recent work on the trauma of the Russian Civil War in the Komsomol, Lourie’s thesis jives well. As many Soviet psychologists in the 1920s noted, the “traumatic neurosis” caused by the violence and brutality of the Civil War prevented veterans from adjusting to peaceful conditions. One Russian historian recently argued that the “war syndrome” infected the Bolshevik Party so much that it contributed to the Terror of the 1930s. Could a trauma from the collapse of the Soviet system explain Putin’s governance?

Boris Nikolaievich Yelstin is dead. Many are sure to evaluate his legacy over the coming days and years. Almost universally hailed as “democratic” in the West, Yeltsin’s rule was a complicated mix of democracy, authoritarianism, oligarchy, theft, corruption, crime, and gangster capitalism. It was a time of hope and fear for the average Russian. Gone was the authoritarianism of the Soviet system, but that vacuum also produced an uneasy feeling of what came next. A spirit of democracy quickly filled that vacuum only to flutter out as “western” democracy became associated with the utter destruction of the Russian social and economic base. Time doesn’t permit to cite the relevant statistics on the precipitous collapse of the standard of living in the 1990s.

Yeltsin, among many things, will be remembered for standing on a tank in Moscow thus preventing counter-revolution, bombarding the White House with tanks, shaking his tail feather during his election campaign, arriving to Berlin drunk, and playing tennis.

Yeltsin will also be remembered for the Chechen War. It was hardly a “small victorious war,” as he and his handlers hoped. Russia’s defeat led to a brief d?tente between Moscow and Grozny in the form of a quasi-independent, though not internationally recognized, Ichkeria.

Yeltsin will be remembered for introducing the world of Vladimir Putin. A virtually unknown figure in 1999 when he became Prime Minister, Putin was originally viewed in Russian oligarchic circles as a manageable bureaucrat who would rule in their name. He wasn’t and what Russia looks like today is very much a result of Putin’s efforts to tame the oligarchy. In this sense, present day Russia is also in part laid in Yeltsin’s lap.

Lastly, in thinking about Yelstin’s presidency, one can’t help make analogies to the 1920s. Also an economically chaotic and socially disastrous yet politically and culturally vibrant time, the 1920s was the hope for a new, democratic Russia. Small “d” democracy was too squashed in the 1920s resulting in Stalin. Stalin, like Putin, was also viewed as manageable by the Bolshevik oligarchy. This underestimation ushered in their demise in the Terror of the 1930s.

While I reject any comparison of Putin to Stalin, the similar historical trajectory of the 1920s and 1990s can’t be denied. Chaos begot stability, but stability came with the cost of crushing of democracy. In my view, it is Yeltsin’s role in this historical echo that will stand out as his most enduring legacy.

Obituaries on Yeltsin abound. Here is a tentative list.

NY Times

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Post-Soviet Leader, Is Dead

Defining Boris Yeltsin

LA Times

Boris Yeltsin, former Russian president, dies

Major events in the life of Boris Yeltsin

Washington Post

Former Russian Leader Boris Yeltsin, 76, Dies

BBC News

Obituary: Boris Yeltsin

RIA Novosti

Russia’s first President Yeltsin dies at 76

More obituaries and analysis are sure to follow in the coming days.